Issue 9: Maura Dooley (for Peter Robinson)

FOR SURE

It was probably Cambridge.

Certainly it was raining

(though it wasn’t Manchester)

and there was blossom,

cherry or almond, you’d have known which.

 

Possibly we spoke of Ashbery, most likely Fisher

and then there were the Italians, 

always the Italians.

The importance of white space

would have come up: and of filling it.


And we’d have agreed on one thing I think,

that although poetry about friendship

was ok, poetry about poetry was not.

Maura Dooley is author of several collections of poetry, notably Sound Barrier (Bloodaxe, 2002) and Life Under Water also with Bloodaxe (2008). She currently teaches creative writing at Goldsmith's, University of London. She has twice been short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.